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Feed of posts on WordPress.com tagged "jerome-kagan"Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:30:46 +0000http://en.wordpress.com/tags/enhttps://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/kagans-longitudinal-study-is-not-about-introverts/
Sun, 02 Oct 2016 14:21:54 +0000Diana Senechalhttps://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/kagans-longitudinal-study-is-not-about-introverts/I have been skeptical of assertions that Jerome Kagan’s longitudinal study, begun in 1989, demonstrates that high-reactive infants turn into introverts, and low-reactive infants into extraverts. I purchased Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman’s book (The Long Shadow of Temperament) to find out. It turns out that it isn’t about introverts and extraverts, nor does it make any claims about them!

The study examines the relation between levels of reactivity in infancy (that is, reactivity to unfamiliar visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli) and subsequent levels of inhibition. Inhibition and introversion are not the same. There is some overlap between them, but one cannot draw conclusions about introverts from a study of inhibition.

Five hundred four-month-old infants were tested for their reactions to stimuli. Of the 237 children who returned for a follow-up study at age 11, only 33 percent of the former high- and low-reactives showed a temperament consistent with their infant behavior (Kagan and Snidman, p. 19). For the purposes of the study, these results are interesting; they do suggest a relation between infant reactivity and later temperament. Still, three points stand out: (a) first, while the study considers all levels of reactivity, it focuses on the high- and low-reactive infants; (b) most of the high- and low-reactive infants under study did not retain the expected behavioral profile at age 11; and (c) the profile of inhibition does not match, point by point, with profiles of introversion and extraversion. Thus any conclusions about introverts and extraverts are incorrect and unwarranted.

I imagine Kagan and Snidman would agree. They take pains to dispel any simplistic conclusions about the predictability of adolescent and adult temperament; in addition, they distinguish between inhibition and introversion. They note on p. 218 that “Carl Jung’s descriptions of the introvert and extrovert, written over 75 years ago, apply with uncanny accuracy to a proportion of our high- and low-reactive adolescents.” They do not specify the proportion, but the very statement suggests a distinction between high-reactivity and introversion.

Nonetheless, people continually cite the study as evidence that high-reactive babies turn into introverts.

Susan Cain states in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, p. 99, “For one of those studies, launched in 1989 and still ongoing, Professor Kagan and his team gathered five hundred four-month-old infants in his Laboratory for Child Development at Harvard, predicting they’d be able to tell, on the strength of a forty-five-minute evaluation, which babies were more likely to turn into introverts or extroverts.”

No, that was not the goal of the study. But that did seem to be her takeaway; in an interview with NPR, she stated that introverts and extraverts have “literally, different nervous systems.” Whether she was referring to Kagan’s study or something else, the statement needs clarification.

Others have seized on the takeaway and taken it even farther. In an opinion piece on PsychCentral, Neil Thompson claims that “Kagan found that those who reacted strongly to the stimuli were introverts, exhibiting serious and careful personalities at each age. The children with minimal reaction to the stimuli were confident and relaxed; they were extroverts (Kagan and Snidman, 2004).” It doesn’t seem that Thompson looked at the book. Moreover, he is equating introversion with inhibition.

When discussing scientific findings on introversion and extraversion, it is essential to define terms clearly, interpret the studies accurately, and apply them carefully to the topic of discussion. (I don’t mean one should be “inhibited” in this regard; one probably needs a mix of intellectual caution and boldness.)

Kagan’s study says nothing about whether infants’ reaction to stimuli predicts their later introversion or extraversion.

Have you ever read a book or seen a film with the stereotypical quiet nerd or popular jock? The quiet nerd is typically portrayed as being smart, mousy, shy, timid, wears glasses, has blue eyes, and is not fond of crowds while the popular jock is described as being outgoing, funny, charming, has dark eyes, and loves a party or being center of attention, right? What if I told you that these stereotypical descriptions are unconscious physical and character depictions of introversion and extroversion? This is just one of several things that Susan Cain touches on in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking.

To be honest, I really enjoyed reading this book. I found it to be quite interesting and pretty insightful. The book, as the title suggests, focuses on the differences between introversion and extroversion and how introverts can not only navigate living in an extroverted society but also succeed and leave a lasting impact. According to Cain, despite the fact that, on average, one third to one half of Americans are introverts, we live in a society focused on what she calls The Extrovert Ideal. She explains this concept as “the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt.” Living in The Extrovert Ideal means that introversion and traits associated with introversion are now considered second class and are undervalued today. She goes on to state that in the beginning of the 20th century our society began to shift from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality which has now evolved into The Extrovert Ideal. This means that over the last century or so we’ve changed from valuing “serious, disciplined, and honorable individuals” to placing an emphasis on those who were “bold and entertaining and a performer.”

One of the first things Cain addresses are some of the descriptions and assumptions that people commonly associate with introversion and the lasting effects it can have on those who have heard these descriptions their whole life. Some of these descriptions include being shy, boring, hermit, anti-social, and slow. This really resonated with me as Cain went on to state that many introverts later in life describe themselves using the same or similar terms because they’ve grown up being told they did not fit with The Extroverted Ideal. Now, I have known I was an introvert since taking a psychology course in high school but the way introverts are commonly perceived didn’t begin to bother me until halfway through college. By the end of my senior year, I absolutely hated the emphasis that was put on having “the college experience” which, to most of my peers, translated into lots of drinking and hitting the bars or night clubs on the weekends and just generally being a super social person. This emphasis also meant that by not participating in drinking or going out every weekend that I was somehow “doing college wrong.” It just wasn’t my scene. And because of that, I felt that I was sometimes judged as boring or aloof by my fellow college students because I would rather read or stay in and watch Netflix with a few friends than go out to the bar of the night with 100 of my closest friends and their dates.

Some psychologists actually believe that introversion and extroversion are traits imbedded in our DNA. They back this up with studies focusing on the prevalence of introversion and extroversion in countries around the world according to their culture as well as looking to other species in the animal kingdom where introversion and extroversion can also be found. Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist, has spent the majority of his career looking at the emotional and cognitive development of children through studies that lasted decades and followed children from infancy into adolescence. In the psychology world he is particularly known for his studies on reactiveness in children that tested their reactions to new experiences such as balloons popping, clowns, tape-recorded voices, and meeting new people. The results of these studies showed the children who were identified as being “high reactive” as infants typically grew up to become introverts while those who were identified as being “low reactive” typically grew up to become extroverts. I found this interesting because it suggests that perhaps the psychologists who believe introversion and extroversion are innate parts of our biology are correct.

Mentioning Kagan’s studies as an example and jumping point for other insights regarding introversion and extroversion is something Cain does consistently throughout the book. She frequently uses prominent figures (ex. Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt), an anecdote of former clients, or personal experiences as examples to start off each chapter and periodically refers back to them throughout the chapter leaving the reader with a sense of cohesiveness and understanding of the topic being discussed. Cain also uses these examples to demonstrate how being an introvert can be an asset in certain situations and professional job settings.

Outside discussing the differences between the two personalities I think this book shows both introverts and extroverts alike that introverts should not be discounted. Many of the world’s creations we can credit to introverts. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, and Steven Spielberg, producer of huge movies that include Schindler’s List and E.T. are just a few examples of introverts who have made an impact on our world.

Overall, I think Cain does a great job of balancing psychology jargon and technical concepts with general language so that the end result is a book that is understandable and relatable to the reader. From an introvert wanting to know how to navigate a busy life without getting overwhelmed to an extroverted parent of an introverted child to someone who may not know how they identify in terms of personality, I highly recommend this book to everyone as I think it contains a takeaway for all. And who knows, you may be surprised at what you learn.

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Wed, 17 Dec 2014 06:00:13 +0000Crystal Klimaviczhttps://readersunbound.com/2014/12/17/a-review-of-quiet-by-susan-cain/https://erictb.wordpress.com/2014/08/09/modern-temperament-vs-classic-temperament-factors/
Sun, 10 Aug 2014 02:03:37 +0000erictbhttps://erictb.wordpress.com/2014/08/09/modern-temperament-vs-classic-temperament-factors/Reading Personality Junkie’s new book (My True Type) and how it mentions Jerome Kagan’s Galen’s Prophecy, which is the premier book on modern mainstream temperament theory, and how he mentions one of them: [high/low] reactivity, in addition to a similar factor from later research: inhibition/unihibition (both of which Drenth connects to I/E), this got me interested in connecting the modern theory to the ancient one. Another common version uses nine factors outlined by Thomas/Chess and Birch.

I think I once did try to connect the nine factors (for children, basically) to classic and typological factors somewhere, but couldn’t readily match anything consistently, so then set that aside, but recently had been thinking of it again.
I discuss this, because many people today will dismiss classic temperament as some ancient myth, like the astrology it was once remotely connected to, and then point out that the valid “temperament” theory recognized today is the nine factors for children.
But classic theory is based on the expressiveness × responsiveness matrix (originally in terms of moisture), and as we’ll see, it looks like these dimensions have simply been split and refined in this newer theory.

So the notion of four (or by extension, five) temperament types is associated with this old, outmoded theory, and the modern one uses “Traits” without making types out of them (just as the official Five Factor Model theory, which is the one that has the most respect in the larger “scientific” field of psychology). But what’s not usually said is that this modern theory did derive “types” from the factors! (Albeit an incomplete matrix).
They are called
“easy”
“difficult” and
“slow-to-warm-up“.

Now it looks like these can fit the categories of expressiveness and responsiveness.

So it seems reactivity then (which seems to closely correspond to “sensitivity” or “sensory threshhold”), as I/E would correspond to Galen’s “hot/cold”.
Activity, approach (initial reaction) and distractibility (And by extension, persistence/attention span) looks like it too, as they all deal with the response to the outside world (which will set the distinction from the internal world), and thus “response-time delay” and “expressed behavior”.

Now looking for the other factor, “moist/dry” (people vs task), Adaptibility, Intensity, and Mood all seem to fit a more “positive/negative” response that woud shape “wanted behavior”.
Regularity, at first glance doesn’t look like it fits, but then since it’s about “routine”, that can shape wanted behavior as well (since the high regularity child will want less disturbance to his routine, and the low regularity child will be more open to change).
Kagan added another factor, for infants who were inactive but cried frequently (distressed) and one for those who showed vigorous activity but little crying (aroused). This also seems like it might fit responsiveness.

The four factors used for the three types were the ones likely associated with “wanted behavior”. The “slow to warm up” was is basically a “difficult child” with low activity specified (the only instance of an “expressive” factor being used), and said to be fairly regular rhythm [in the last link].

So the three look like partial portraits of Melancholies and perhaps a Phlegmatic.

Edit: I’m realizing “adaptibility” is something the Sanguines in Control, as SP’s have a hold on. Their preference is extraverted Sensing, which exploits the current tangible environement, which on one hand, gives them their higher expressed Control (“pragmatism”), but on the other hand, allows them to drop it when needed, and take another course of action. The Chleric in Control doesn’t adapt like that, and will keep pushing. The other “motive focused” temperament, NF, will also adapt, according to others’ wants or needs.

Also worthy of mention is the Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis® (T-JTA®)https://www.tjta.com/tjtafaq.htm which unlike other “temperament analyses”, seems to be a more “standardized” and “in extensive use as a diagnostic instrument” that is designed for use in individual, premarital, marital, group, and family counseling.

It also has nine dipolar factors (and what they seem to line up with):

I recently stepped inside my old high school for the first time in 10 years for a recent Honors Night ceremony. Watching the kids saunter and amble across the stage with their medallions, placards, and certificates, I got a weird feeling I couldn’t shake.

All of the kids looked suspiciously out of it. Their eyes bulged underneath the auditorium lights, like deer staring down a convoy of Mack Trucks. They didn’t look happy to be receiving their awards. In fact, they looked downright confused, and on more than one occasion, a handler had to physically move them around so everybody could fit on stage. These sure as hell didn’t look like autonomous individuals, or even individuals cognizant of their own surroundings. Something was seriously wrong here.

Then it dawned on me. The emcee for the event wasn’t the principal, or VP, or a coach of any kind. The guy in charge of leading the event—and by proxy, the student honorees—was the school psychiatrist.

[tc-related post=238940]

Goodness, how things have changed in only a decade. When I was in high school, all we had was a counselor, and he didn’t even ask us about our personal lives. His job, to the best of my recollection, was to merely help students arrange their class schedules and maybe, if he was feeling especially generous, hand out a college pamphlet or two. Today, however, the school counselor means something entirely different—he or she is the state-sanctioned liaison between the student body and pharmaceutical-tossing clinicians.

My senior year, I didn’t know a single classmate on psychiatric medications. Surely, there had to have been a few, but there was still a stigma of sorts attached to it, so if anybody was on Prozac, they definitely didn’t run around flapping their gums about it. Oh, we drank plenty of beer and vodka and smoked a ton of weed and dipped a whole hell of a lot of Skoal, but we drew the line at Xanax and Effexor. Even recreational use of stuff such as Ritalin was frowned upon.

Flash-forward to the present, however, and it’s a completely different story. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, at least 10 percent of US middle-schoolers and high-schoolers in 2012 were on antidepressants or anti-anxiety prescriptions. Perhaps more unnerving, more than a million children in America were found to be on antipsychotic medications alone, with tens of thousands of kids under the age of five routinely being prescribed meds such as Zyprexa.

Look, I’m no Thomas Szasz. I do believe things like severe depression and anxiety exist, and in many cases, psychotropic prescriptions for young people may be warranted. But I also feel that today’s youth are being overmedicated, overprescribed, and overloaded with drugs they don’t need, and in quantities that are irresponsibly high.

Back in the 1970s, everyone thought depression and anxiety were brought about by psychosocial stressors. Well, sometime in the 1980s—coincidentally, around the same time selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac started becoming fashionable—there was this complete paradigm shift. Now, it wasn’t psychological baggage making you feel sad and antsy, but instead, biochemical misfires…which, fittingly enough, could be remedied by all these SSRIs that were flooding the market.

Growing up, I knew a lot of adults who were on SSRIs. They used to talk about doing them at family get-togethers like they were commenting on chili recipes or something. Twenty years later, every last adult I knew who was sold on the Prozac Solution—every last damn one of ’em—is hopelessly hooked on harder prescriptions, mentally frazzled to the point of incompetence, or dead. Now, that’s not to say that those antidepressants were solely responsible for their less-than-desirable outcomes, but as a constant variable, it’s nonetheless interesting to consider.

Longitudinally, I don’t think anybody knows what these pharmaceuticals do to folks. Considering the sway Big Pharma has on the FDA and physician organizations, however, there’s probably a reason why we haven’t seen that many studies outlining the long-term effects of psychiatric drug use. Call me cynical, but the fact these manufacturers are raking in so much dough makes me question their humanistic motives a smidge.

These companies are businesses, after all, and something tells me they care more about creating regular customers than helping people out. With that in mind, who could be a better brand loyalist than the kiddos? You start them off early, pump them full of meds—many categorized as benzodiazepine drugs, which have effects staggeringly similar to narcotics—and as they get older, you can sell ’em different drugs that are designed to wean them off the drugs they’ve been on their entire lives. It’s cradle-to-grave marketing at its finest and something the Nanny State is actively encouraging.

[tc-related post=308835 align=right]

For about three years, I covered the US juvenile-justice and youth-services beat. I talked to probably 100 or so kids who were in detention or were in detention at one point, and virtually every one of them told me they were on some kind of psychiatric medication as children. Furthermore, the rate of foster-care youth on psychotropic medication is even higher than in the juvenile system. The Denver Post says that youth in foster services are 12 TIMES LIKELIER to be prescribed psychotropic medications than other youths receiving Medicaid services. Nine out of the ten most commonly prescribed drugs for youth in foster care are heavy-duty psychiatric drugs; comparatively, only one psychotropic drug cracks the top-ten list for non-foster care youths receiving Medicaid.

It gets worse. According to a Rutgers study, three-quarters of youths in the nation who are prescribed psychotropic meds were found to be taking them for non-FDA-approved reasons. Pharmaceutical companies spent about $800 million in 2008 alone to pimp their psychiatric drugs to physicians and healthcare providers may or may not have something to do with that.

Since the nation’s juvenile justice and foster-care youth population make up a paltry percentage of the total number of children in the US, you may be inclined to write off the disturbing data above as something that only affects the extreme and marginalized pockets of America’s under-18 population. Alas, there seems to be an increasingly popular access point for youths to get their psychiatric med hook-up—your local school system.

Today, public schools are GARGANTUAN service points and patient pools for mental-healthcare providers and psychiatrists. For the most part, this can be attributed to the increased prevalence of psychiatrists on school payrolls, who—if not being able to directly prescribe medications for students—can most certainly connect them with psychologists, physicians, and other counselors in the community who can. And while federal law clearly forbids school systems from requiring students to take prescribed medications as a conditional for attending school, most parents remain oblivious. If the school sends their kid to a shrink, and the shrink says that kid meets a loosely defined set of symptoms for the mental disorder du jour, it’s a near guarantee that kid is about to get dispensed a whole shit load of pharmaceuticals. When we talk about greater investments in “mental health services,” that’s all we’re talking about; more damn drugs being doled out, largely on the public’s dime.

If you’re wondering why there’s been such a dramatic increase in the number of kids who have been diagnosed with behavioral and mental health disorders over the last two decades or so, it’s probably because a greater overall percentage of school-aged children are only going through the diagnosis process. And with all of the kickbacks and government subsidies coming into play, is it strange to think that SOME physicians may have financial incentives of their own to diagnose—and then medicate—as many children as they can?

Well, the Journal of Health Economics published a report stating that a good one-fifth of children diagnosed with ADHD in 2010 were almost certainly misdiagnosed with the disorder. This, after Harvard’s Jerome Kagan told Der Spiegel that 90 percent of youths diagnosed with ADHD probably don’t have abnormal dopamine systems—and that, after Leon Eisenberg said that ADHD was a “prime example of a fabricated disease.” By the way, Eisenberg is the man largely credited with “discovering” attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Didn’t Eli Lilly spend more than a billion dollars pimping its antipsychotic drugs for “off-label” adolescent use? Didn’t GSK catch a lot of flak for attempting to market Paxil to schoolchildren? Shit, Pfizer actually HIRED more than 200 child psychiatrists to promote adolescent use of the drug Geodone, which the FDA had labeled unfit for children. And then there’s Johnson & Johnson, who got pounded with a $2.2 billion fine for marketing the psychotropic Risperdal to autistic children. They even held “Back to School Bash” campaigns, spreading the gospel of increased childhood prescriptions through ice-cream socials.

All the hubbub we’re hearing about new-wave psychoanalytic tools—things such as Functional Family Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy—are masking the obvious endpoints of such services: more kids on more pills.

I’ve seen grade-schoolers—we’re talking six- and seven-year-old kids here—drooling out of the side of their mouths. There isn’t a question of if these drugs are harming them, but of how badly they’re harming them. Hormonally and neurodevelopmentally, adolescence is a major transitional period. All of those biochemical and neurological changes already put kids at a major cognitive disadvantage, so why are we surprised when teens and tweens on powerful antidepressants and anxiety meds wind up totally flipping out?

In 2011, the CDC released a report finding that prescription drug use across all ages in the United States had increased 400 percent over the last 20 years. Mental-health services are a major driving force in that astounding uptick, where the chaise lounge has been fully supplanted by the pill dispensary.

We no longer entertain the possibility of contextual, environmental factors playing a role in one’s mental health. Instead of blaming chemical imbalances, is it all that heretical to blame actual psychostressors—such as shitty parents and shitty schools—for teen depression?

I’d say a good 90 percent of teens and kids on psychiatric drugs would be better served by better human interaction than antidepressants. That means connecting them with people who actually talk to them and listen to them without judging them, grading them, or—most importantly—trying to figure out which med would fix them up the most.

That’s the heart of the matter, I guess. It takes time and effort to help kids build pro-social bonds and develop personal coping mechanisms, while it takes only five minutes to pick up a drugstore refill. [tc-mark]

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Tue, 17 Dec 2013 02:01:55 +0000llcallhttps://llcall.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/neals-a-lot-sensitive/I wrote Friday’s post first because it was pondering Addison and her temperament that first made me want to read The Highly Sensitive Person. But interestingly, almost as soon as I began reading, I stopped thinking about Addison and started thinking about Neal.

If Addison does turn out to be an HSP, I probably shouldn’t be quite so surprised. After all, she is her father’s daughter and in case you were wondering, Neal displays a lot of attributes of a textbook HSP (though in tomorrow’s post, I’ll explain more about HSP variations; you know, just to complicate things). Not that I doubted it, but reading the first couple of profiles of highly sensitive infants and children in Aron’s book certainly confirmed my opinion. I felt like I was been reading all the accounts I’ve heard from his parents and sister of his disgruntled infancy. I’m fairly convinced Jerome Kagan, who pioneered the research on “high reactive” (just one of the many names used to describe the trait) infants, would have identified Neal as such in an instant.

I have never mentioned this on here before (though I drafted a whole blog post about it almost 18 months ago that’s still in editing purgatory) but when we were in marriage counseling, we spent nearly an entire session devoted to a discussion of whether Neal has Asperger’s syndrome (back when it was still called that). Long story short (for once): after a casual consultation with a more experienced colleague, the therapists agreed that Neal fit a variety of the characteristics that could put him on the very high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, possibly “Asperger’s lite” to use their words.

What does autism have to do with high sensitivity? Well, that’s actually very tricky. On Elaine Aron’s website, in an article written in August 2009, she explains that it is perhaps hardest to distinguish high sensitivity from autism spectrum disorders in adult men. However, one of your best indicators should be that “those with Asperger’s still show a lack of understanding of what is going on emotionally in the other person even if they can hold a conversation.” She further describes an experience with a man with Asperger’s, concluding that “he could experience his own emotions, but he could not read the signs of the emotional experiences of others,” which would stand in stark contrast to HSPs.

Interestingly, though, around the same time that article was published, studies began to question the very pervasive idea that those with autism lack empathy. The “intense world” theory suggested that atypical responses to social situations might be due to an excess of empathy — a hypersensitivity to experience — rather than a lack of it. As far as I can tell, this perspective has only gainedsupport over the intervening years. I wonder, then, if Aron misunderstands the distinction between autism spectrum disorders and high sensitivity. If this new notion of excess empathy leading to withdrawal in autistic individuals continues to be supported by research, what then becomes the primary distinction between an HSP and someone with an autism spectrum disorder? If you find out, will you let me know?

My best guess is that it has to do with the level of functioning, and in that sense, I think the HSP label probably fits Neal better. It acknowledges that there is something about his innate physical functioning that he probably can’t change, and will at times be ruled by when he experiences over-arousal. Still, for the most part he leads a “normal” life, including having family, friends (1 or 2 at least, unless you count his 3,600+ Facebook fans), and the ability to make a living.

It seems only fair to point out that while Neal can agree that he’s very sensitive to some things (especially tactile stimuli like, you know, his fingernails being too close to his fingers), he is somewhat reluctant to completely embrace this HSP label. For most of his life, his own concept of self has been based around the idea that he is a calm, easy-going person — not one of Jerome Kagan’s high-reactive infants that was prone to become an anxious adult. “When I had no responsibility for anyone else, I was always calm and relaxed,” he tells me. It seemed only fitting to share with him another passage from Quiet about those short and long SERT alleles I was talking about:

“Similarly, short allele adults have been shown to have more anxiety in the evening than others when they’ve had stressful days, but less anxiety on calm days.” (p. 113)

It would be hard to overstate how closely this resonates with my observations of Neal. Of course, as enlightening as it was to think about Neal in the context of high sensitivity, my most important discovery had nothing to do with him. Stay tuned . . .

One misdiagnosed case, two misdiagnosed cases, fifty thousand misdiagnosed cases do not negate the existence of ADHD. Lots of disorders can not be measured by a blood draw, MRI, X-Ray etc.. Thankfully those aren’t the only diagnostic tools that doctors have on hand. There are specific criteria that must be met for someone to be diagnosed with ADHD. It’s not as if some lazy, government drone, sees an energetic, undisciplined kid and forces pills down his throat.

— Yeah, sure, right. Specific criteria. I had listed the MAIN CRITERIA the United Nation‘s WHO itself lists for diagnosing ADHD. Here is a subset of those criteria, from a supportive site that promoted the diagnosis:

http://www.health.com/health/condition-article/0,,20252859,00.html 1. How often do you have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization? 2. When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started? 3. How often are you distracted by activity or noise around you? 4. How often do you leave your seat in meetings or other situations in which you are expected to remain seated? 5. How often do you feel restless or fidgety? 6. How often do you have difficulty waiting your turn in situations when turn taking is required?

My reaction to this was “So from the WHO, somebody who’s disorganized, procrastinates, works in a noisy environment, gets bored with boring meetings, and doesn’t like to wait in lines… is ADHD!” Let’s redo that without changing the meaning, but apply it to the younger set:

So from the W.H.O., some kid in a class who’s disorganized, procrastinates, is distracted by rowdy classmates, gets bored and fidgets with boring CLASSES (maybe he’s way ahead of his class), and really doesn’t like to wait in lines… is ADHD!

That is what falls out directly from from the list.. Now you can even check in with in the web site that serves as the government-mouthpiece misinformation spinmeisters, even as they say that the story that this doctor said it is a “just an invention”. While they title the piece “A Work of Fiction”, they still have to admit it is “partially true”. The doctor did say this, according to first-hand reports published months before the doctor’s death:

A tall, thin man with glasses and suspenders opened the door to his apartment in Harvard Square in 2009, invited me to the kitchen table, and poured coffee. He said that he never would have thought his discovery would someday become so popular. “ADHD is a prime example of a fabricated disorder,” Eisenberg said. “The genetic predisposition to ADHD is completely overrated.”

Okay so Eisenberg said “fabricated disease”, not “invented disease”. So where did the “invented” come from? Speigel also interviewed another Harvard doctor, Dr. Jerome Kagan:

SPIEGEL: Experts speak of 5.4 million American children who display the symptoms typical of ADHD. Are you saying that this mental disorder is just an invention?

Kagan: That’s correct; it is an invention. Every child who’s not doing well in school is sent to see a pediatrician, and the pediatrician says: “It’s ADHD; here’s Ritalin.” In fact, 90 percent of these 5.4 million kids don’t have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they’ll make the corresponding diagnosis.

Some people might not say it out loud, but this is how they think: “I know it’s true, because my government told me it’s true, and anything else is a conspiracy theory!”.

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Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:14:35 +0000perspectivenewsletterhttps://perspectivenewsletter.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/500-babies-in-a-room/Imagine a room filled with five hundred four month old babies. If you’ve spent time with an infant recently, you know it seems impossible to guess what the baby will look like in the future, let alone predict future personality traits. Jerome Kagan, a reputed psychologist, claimed he could tell you if a baby would be an introvert or an extrovert after just forty five minutes of interaction. Miraculously, most of his predictions turned out to be correct. The process was simple. He exposed a baby to sights (strangers’ faces), smells (swab of alcohol), and sounds (strange voices) they had never experienced before. Twenty percent of them reacted excitedly to all stimuli- they pumped their fists, squealed with delight and shook with fear. The other children were relatively calm and unmoved, making no sudden movements or sounds. The future introverts, Kagan conjectured, were the twenty percent children who reacted the most. Why? Introverts are sensitive, not just in the emotional way, but because they raise their heads and pay attention when they encounter stimuli they are not accustomed too. Normal volume for extroverts is ear piercingly loud to introverts. The calm and composed children didn’t react because they really didn’t pay attention and this is precisely why they will probably become gregarious risk takers in the future. In these groundbreaking longitudinal studies, Kagan not only proved the high sensitivity of introverts but also that temperament, especially relating to introversion and extroversion, remains relatively unchanged as a child grows. So no, being an introvert is normal and no, you can’t decide to change your temperament and you probably shouldn’t.

Anisha Tyagi

]]>https://secondword.net/2013/07/28/review-the-human-spark-the-science-of-human-development-by-jerome-kagan/
Mon, 29 Jul 2013 01:05:05 +0000jz2ndhttps://secondword.net/2013/07/28/review-the-human-spark-the-science-of-human-development-by-jerome-kagan/Here is my Shelf Awareness review for Jerome Kagan’s The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development. The relationship between nature and nurture has always fascinated me. The idea that nurture confirms or mitigates or triggers what nature bestows is confirmed by current research. The relationship between and “self” is another rich topic and I admire Kagan’s clear distinction between self-awareness and self-respect on the one hand versus self-indulgence on the other, a distinction, he argues, that many young people do not presently learn.

The review in its entirety:

Jerome Kagan, emeritus professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of The Nature of the Child, is one of the pioneers of developmental psychology and among its most influential thinkers. His focus has been in the area of children’s cognitive and emotional development, especially the genetic or environmental roots of temperament. In the thought-provoking The Human Spark, Kagan identifies the development of cognitive, emotional and moral stages that children reveal at common ages and shows what variances can be traced to environmental factors like parenting, birth order or social norms.

Far more than another round in the nature/nurture debate, Kagan describes how flawed research based on cultural assumptions can lead to widely accepted conclusions that influence public policy. For example, he presents research that disproves infant determinism, the common notion that certain negative early childhood experiences doom a child to an unhappy adulthood. In one of many fascinating asides, he suggests that this idea developed out of a larger historical trend favoring a middle class with nuclear families, where a new class of stay-at-home mothers were given social responsibility for infant emotional and intellectual development and behavior–an idea that continues to drive policy and shape cultural expectations.

Authoritative and surprising, Kagan guides us through the most current research in the field, tracing its shifting intellectual fashions from emphasizing “nurture” to the current reliance on neuroscience and showing how these fashions play out culturally. This wise and affirming book is essential reading for anyone interested in what makes us human.

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Sun, 19 May 2013 13:07:33 +0000Brian Smith - Reformed Control Freakhttps://briansmithpld.com/2013/05/19/nature-or-nurture-are-you-the-boss-of-you/Are we born who we are – or do we have the ability to change into someone else? Jerome Kagan, who has devoted his career to studying the emotional and cognitive development of children believes it’s a little of both. His research suggests that introversion – extraversion is only 40 to 50 percent heritable. “To ask whether it’s nature or nurture is like asking is a blizzard caused by temperature or humidity – it’s the intricate interaction between the two that makes us who we are”. After reading Malcolm Gladwell’s take on the 10,000 hour rule I don’t think we are naturally born to do anything. I think you can accomplish what ever you set out to do. You can rewire your brain. I believe you are the boss of you. You and you alone get to decide your fate in life. Only you and you alone get to decide where you end up.

Dr. Carl Schwartz, director of the Developmental Neuroimaging and Psychopathology Research Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, is convinced that we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. “Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. Part of who we are is ordained at birth by our genes, by our brains and nervous systems”. However, he also believes that because we have “free will” – the power to choose – we can use it to shape our personalities. Susan Cain – author of “Quiet – The Power ofIntroverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” refers to this as “the rubber band” theory of personality. Picture yourself as a rubber band at rest. Just like that rubber band you are elastic and can stretch yourself. You can rewire your brain. You are capable of developing different habits to get a different result.

Do you marvel at how some people have the ability to motivate others, inspire people to take action and influence the top decision makers and wished you could do the same? You can learn to do that as well. You can learn to be more patient, empathetic, flexible, open-minded or a good listener? You can learn how to communicate and interact more effectively with others? The question is – Are you willing to put in the time and effort to make the kinds of changes you’ll need to make to realize your full potential? One of the best ways to learn a new skill is to observe someone doing it the way you would like to do it and copy them. Think of someone you admire. What is it about the way they act that you identify with? Do they remain calm in stressful situations? When they speak – do others listen? Are they really good at making new friends? Do they lead by example? When they walk into a room do others take notice? Are they compassionate towards those less fortunate? You and you alone get to decide your fate in life. Only you and you alone get to decide where you end up. Only you and you alone get to decide the kind of person you want to be. Think it, act it, become it … You are the boss of you. :-)

(C) Copyright 2013. Brian Smith-PLD. May not be reproduced without permission. Brian Smith works with people who want to learn how to communicate and interact more effectively; and who want to discover how to get the best out of themselves and others. He is available for speaking engagements, seminars and workshops. Visit http://briansmithpld.com to find out more.

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Sun, 24 Mar 2013 01:00:39 +0000merlinsbookshttps://merlinsbooks.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/psychologys-ghosts-jerome-kagan/https://danablog.org/2012/09/13/learning-and-brain-conference-boston/
Thu, 13 Sep 2012 14:44:14 +0000danablog505https://danablog.org/2012/09/13/learning-and-brain-conference-boston/As
the son of a former high school English teacher, I am always keen to hear the latest
policies, theories, and research in education. One of the most fascinating
areas of research in education is its intersection with neuroscience. As our
understanding of the brain changes, our theories on teaching have changed
as well. However, this change is often delayed because information does not
flow easily from the neuroscience lab to the classroom.

Learning and the Brain has been building
that bridge through conferences, institutes, and seminars that bring together
educators and neuroscientists. The conferences always cover different themes;
the upcoming one, Nov. 16-18 in Boston, is titled, “Educating
Diverse Minds: Using Individual Brain Differences to Teach and Reach All
Learners.” One of the biggest challenges for teachers is figuring out how
to reach all of their students. No
two brains are exactly alike, and no two students’ learning processes are
exactly alike either. Neuroscientists, including Dana Alliance member and Dana
Press author Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., will
discuss how factors like genes, personal experience, adversity, poverty,
parenting, and previous education can influence the ways students learn and
what these differences mean for educators.

The
Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives is a co-sponsor of the Learning and the
Brain conference. In November, we are sponsoring the Friday reception and will
have an information table at the conference with free materials, including our ever-popular squeezy brains. If you
are an educator, you should consider registering for this conference. If you do,
please stop by our table, say hello, and grab some free squeezy brains—before
they’re all gone!

–Simon
Fischweicher

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Mon, 27 Aug 2012 23:55:41 +0000parentsfriendhttps://parents-are-people-too.com/2012/08/27/were-you-an-abandoned-child-really/https://engineeringevil.com/2012/08/07/harvard-psychologist-jerome-kagan-offers-a-scathing-critique-of-the-mental-health-establishment-and-pharmaceutical-companies-accusing-them-of-incorrectly-classifying-millions-as-mentally-ill-out-of/
Tue, 07 Aug 2012 01:51:10 +0000Ralph Turchianohttps://engineeringevil.com/2012/08/07/harvard-psychologist-jerome-kagan-offers-a-scathing-critique-of-the-mental-health-establishment-and-pharmaceutical-companies-accusing-them-of-incorrectly-classifying-millions-as-mentally-ill-out-of/https://danablog.org/2012/07/26/from-the-archives-why-the-arts-matter/
Thu, 26 Jul 2012 11:51:26 +0000danablog505https://danablog.org/2012/07/26/from-the-archives-why-the-arts-matter/The Dana Foundation has long been interested in education and the arts. The advent of the field of neuroeducation, or mind, brain, and education science, led to several free Dana publications, which are still available online and in print.

One of these resources, Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain, published in 2009, reprinted a keynote address given by Dana Alliance Member Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., of Harvard University. Kagan spoke to the educators attending a summit co-sponsored by The Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Neuro-Education Initiative on “Why the Arts Matter.”

As someone who took for granted the art and music classes offered throughout my public-school education and into college, his words have a great impact. Why should today’s students be the victims of budget cuts? Why shouldn’t they have the opportunity to sing and act and paint? Here is my favorite excerpt:

“When a dozen children or youth complete a mural or play an orchestral piece, the group, not the individual, is the target of praise. My friends who sing in choirs report their intense feeling of exhilaration when they are singing together in front of an audience. This emotion is not exactly like the feeling evoked when one receives a grade of 100 on a test. The problems facing the contemporary world demand some subversion of self’s interests in order to lift the interests of the larger community into a position of ascendance. Perhaps participation in a school orchestra is a useful preparation for the stance that will be required in this century.”

Moreover, writes Kagan, the arts could help close the achievement gap.

“If an arts program helped only one-half of the seven million children who are behind in reading and arithmetic by providing them with a sense of pride and the belief that they might have some talent, the high school dropout rate would fall. This program might also help children gain a richer appreciation of their emotional life and what it means to be human.”

An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition.

Specific links exist between high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in both working and long-term memory; these links extend beyond the domain of music training.

Training in acting appears to lead to memory improvement through the learning of general skills for manipulating semantic information.

In children, there appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation, though not in other forms of numerical representation.

Correlations exist between music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. One of the central predictors of early literacy, phonological awareness, is correlated with both music training and the development of a specific brain pathway.

Summer is a wonderful time for exposing yourself to art. Go to a free play or concert in the park; take advantage of an air-conditioned museum; sign up for a class; or join a choir, orchestra, dance, or theater group. The evidence is in: the arts can do powerful things.

–Johanna Goldberg

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Tue, 12 Jun 2012 15:10:38 +0000danablog505https://danablog.org/2012/06/12/summer-reading-list-brain-books/Last year I wrote a summer reading list blog, highlighting brain books recently published by members of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. Since then, our members have published a number of new books on topics ranging from addiction to free will to neurogastronomy. When you get around to finishing the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy (it’s everywhere!), here are some great books to keep in mind (descriptions are taken directly from the publishers’ websites).

The Addicted Brain: Why We Abuse Drugs, Alcohol, and Nicotine, by Michael Kuhar, FT Science Press. “Addiction destroys lives. In The Addicted Brain, a leading neuroscientist explains how and why this happens–and presents advances in treatment and prevention. Using breathtaking brain imagery and other research, Michael Kuhar, Ph.D., shows the powerful, long-term brain changes that drugs can cause, revealing why it can be so difficult for addicts to escape their grip.”

The Age of Insight, by Eric R. Kandel, Random House, Inc.“A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art.”

The Biology of Alzheimer Disease, edited by DABI members Dennis J. Selkoe, M.D., David M. Holtzman, M.D., and Eckhard Mandelkow, Ph.D., Cold Spring Harbor Press. “Written and edited by leading experts in the field, this volume includes contributions covering all aspects of Alzheimer disease, from our current molecular understanding to therapeutic agents that could be used to treat and, ultimately, prevent it.”

Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters, by Gordon M. Shepherd, M.D., D.Phil, Columbia University Press. “Leading neuroscientist Gordon M. Shepherd embarks on a paradigm-shifting trip through the “human brain flavor system,” laying the foundations for a new scientific field: neurogastronomy. Challenging the belief that the sense of smell diminished during human evolution, Shepherd argues that this sense, which constitutes the main component of flavor, is far more powerful and essential than previously believed.”

Psychology’s Ghosts, by Jerome Kagan, Yale Press. “Jerome Kagan, a theorist and leading researcher, examines popular practices and assumptions held by many psychologists. He uncovers a variety of problems that, troublingly, are largely ignored by investigators and clinicians. Yet solutions are available, Kagan maintains, and his reasoned suggestions point the way to a better understanding of the mind and mental illness.”

Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain, by Michael Gazzaniga, Ecco.“The father of cognitive neuroscience and author of Human offers a provocative argument against the common belief that our lives are wholly determined by physical processes and we are therefore not responsible for our actions.”

Between reading Susan Cain‘s book Quiet, excerpts from Edge.org‘s not so wonderfully titled This Will Make You Smarter, and analyzing my own Myers Briggs INFJpersonality type, I have been contemplating the complexities of human personality and human choice quite a lot in the past few weeks.

Quiet explains that personality is a combination of biologically based temperament and character traits stemming from experience. Introverts are high-reactive and extroverts are low-reactive with regards to external stimuli. Cain focuses on the research of Jerome Kagan to discuss how we all grow into our introvert, extrovert, and ambivert selves. High-reactive children pay “alert attention,” showing higher levels of eye movement to compare choices before making a decision. Often deeper processors of information, high-reactive children typically spend more time on tasks and are also more likely to make the correct selection in the end. I relate to this kind of behavior, myself, and I can’t help but wonder if intensive focus and deep processing shapes as many nonconformists as conformists.

Reward sensitivity is another biological basis for introversion. Extroverts’ dopamine pathways are more active than those of introverts. Introverts have a smaller response to the reward system, it seems.

In This Will Make You Smarter, Evolutionary PsychologistGeoffrey Miller asks us all to rethink how rigidly we define the distinction between Personality and Insanity. Mental disorders are often associated with maladaptive extremes of the “Big Five”personality traits. The “Big Five” personality traits resulting from temperament + character are: 1) openness 2) conscientiousness 3) extroversion 4) agreeableness 5) emotional stability. Extremely low or high levels of these traits predict everything from compulsive disorders, drug addiction, depression, anxiety, and paranoid personality disorder. But as Miller writes, “the new field of positive psychology acknowledges [that] we are all very far from optimal mental health, and we are all more or less crazy in many ways.”

And then I started thinking about the Myers Briggs test and Horoscopes, and how satisfying the answers can be. They both rely on a small set of rather generic pieces of information which are shuffled in different combinations.

But it is important to consider that while re-inventing one’s personality is possible, in part, if new attributes counter one’s natural temperament, it will be exhausting to maintain. This is why Myers Briggs tests give me some solace when they recommend careers that sound like fulfilling and challenging options–but not uncomfortably challenging.

I encourage you to take a closer look at the people you love and pay attention to their natural reactions to stimuli. Consider their parents’, friends’, and former classmates’ character traits. It’s kind of fascinating when you begin to pay closer attention to other people’s biology + values.

I danced to this song as a 6 or 7-year-old. Will never forget it. “Personality” by Lloyd Price.